THERE are times when party politics seems boring and trivial. Armies clashing by night. Lots of martial music and plenty of cannon fire. But nothing real at stake.

Theresa May arriving at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester

When politicians are operating in this mode sensible people stop listening. Why waste time on an endless “Yes, you did”, “No, I didn’t” dispute between partisan opponents who have no reason for being partisan other than the desire of their parties for power?

But there are other times when party politics becomes real and meaningful.

At these times, the debate is about something fundamental that will have a profound and lasting effect on our lives.

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A free market economy, operating under the right rules and regulations, is the greatest agent of collective human progress ever created

Theresa May

Last week, in Brighton, Jeremy Corbyn and colleagues set out a remarkable agenda. Full-scale re-nationalisation; £310billion additional public borrowing; huge tax increases; a return to the council estates, rent controls and labour laws of the 1960s and 1970s.

As Momentum groupies cheered and backers derided the Queen, the CBI warned future investment would be diminished and that “jobs and growth are being put at risk”.

Corbyn’s reaction? Send in shadow chancellor John McDonnell to tell the world that Labour is preparing for a run on the pound if it wins power.

When Tony Blair was leader, the election of a Labour government was a way of slightly adjusting Britain’s direction.

The election of one in 2022 under Mr Corbyn would be a way of creating a democratic revolution.

We know where this sort of revolutionary socialist programme leads. And it is happening right now in Venezuela, where a Corbynista government was democratically elected, one that Corbyn himself has described as an “inspiration to all of us fighting back against neo-liberalism... showing us there is a better way of doing things. It’s called socialism.”

Since Corbyn’s praise, Venezuela’s economy has shrunk by eight per cent in a year; inflation has hit 480 per cent; and unemployment is 17 per cent. So this is “a better way of doing things”.

It all starts with a vision of “a kinder, gentler way of doing politics”; and it all ends with something that is neither kind nor gentle.

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Jeremy Corbyn and fellow Labour members at the Labour Party conference in Brighton

But it isn’t just Mr Corbyn who has made our politics important and interesting again.

As the Conservative conference starts, the leadership is recognising that the case for social market capitalism needs to be made all over again.

Any illusion that Margaret Thatcher won that argument permanently by dragging Britain out of the economic tail-spin into which it had been sent by inefficient nationalised monopolies and hard-left trade unionists has now been stripped away.

Theresa May realises she needs to set out why and how capitalism, appropriately tamed by the state, can provide a level of prosperity that is better for everyone than anything Mr Corbyn’s Venezuela-style socialism can offer. And she found the words to say it.

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Sir Oliver Letwin suggests that the case for social market capitalism needs to made all over again

In a landmark speech last Thursday, she said that “a free market economy, operating under the right rules and regulations, is the greatest agent of collective human progress ever created”.

She laid out what this involves: “An open market place, in which everyone is free to participate, regulated under the rule of law, with personal freedoms, equality and human rights democratically guaranteed, and an accountable government progressively taxing the economic activity which the market generates, to fund high quality public services which are freely available to all citizens, according to need.”

As she rightly said: “That is unquestionably the best, and indeed the only sustainable, means of increasing the living standards of everyone in a country.”

So there, at last, we have it. A Corbyn-led Labour Party that is advocating Venezuelan socialism. And a Conservative Party whose Prime Minister has discovered in herself the voice and the argument that the party needs.

It is the age-old argument between well-intentioned but disastrous socialist theory and the social market economy that can deliver a combination of prosperity and social justice that no other system has ever delivered.

The country needs to have that argument now, so it elects a government in 2022 which preserves the prosperity and public services we have, rather than putting them in peril.

And then it will need a Labour Party that returns to sanity so we can go back to having boring politics which doesn’t threaten our way of life.

Hearts And Minds, The Battle For The Conservative Party From Thatcher To The Present, by Sir Oliver Letwin, is out tomorrow (£20, Biteback).